The Override

Andrew Kavovit had one rule- never override a security protocol. Not even for the President. It was the kind of principle that kept him alive through seventeen years as a systems engineer at Harlow SecureTech — the world’s most advanced private security firm.

But tonight, as rain needled the glass dome above his desk and the lights of the city glowed like warning signs, he hovered his fingers over the console, one tap away from obliterating that rule.

It was 2:46 a.m., and he had exactly seven minutes before the system’s watchdog A.I. would register the anomaly. Long enough, if he didn’t think too hard about what he was doing. Long enough to save her.

Across the room, a monitor flickered, showing a live feed from Baylock Detainment Center. Level Four. Isolation Block. Cell 213.

Inside, seated cross-legged on a cot with her hands folded like she was praying, was Kiowa Maddox — Andrew's partner for the last six years, and his wife for the last two. Her dark hair was braided tight, her eyes fixed on nothing, like she’d already left the room in her mind.

They’d taken her three days ago. Classified breach. No trial. No contact. Just vanished — until tonight, when Andrew finally cracked the internal dispatch logs and saw her name buried under “insider threat containment.”

Insider threat. The words echoed like a punch to the ribs.

He knew what they meant. Kiowa had been in the same circles. The same kind of access, same clearances. She could’ve dug into things. He remembered the quiet tension in her voice lately, the way she asked questions that went nowhere. She must’ve found something she wasn’t supposed to. And now she was going to vanish forever unless he did the one thing he swore never to do.

Break the rules.

The screen in front of him blinked. [SECURE ZONE OVERRIDE – INITIATE?]

He hesitated. If he did this, there was no going back. He’d be tracked, flagged, fired — maybe worse. But none of that mattered if she didn’t make it out alive.

He tapped the key.

Override accepted. Accessing Level Four schematics.

Andrew plugged in a bypass drive and started writing the false clearance for the extraction team. He had to move fast. The AI would notice missing security cycles in minutes. He rerouted surveillance loops, disabled biometric locks in a thirty-second window, and spun a plausible emergency drill as a cover.

Except — one of the firewall triggers didn’t go dark. He froze. Line 436 of the clearance code was wrong. A single mistyped variable — authSig instead of authSIG. It should’ve thrown a red flag. Maybe it still would. His fingers hovered. “Come on, come on,” he muttered, heart hammering. He corrected the line, then triple-checked the cascade. The seconds bled away. He almost scrapped the whole command set. Almost. But then the override cleared. No alerts. He exhaled — sharp, shaky — and kept going.

By 3:01 a.m., the plan was live.

He sent the command.

Two floors down, in the basement launch bay, an automated retrieval drone activated. Unmanned, silent, and fast. It would lift Kiowa directly through the access chute and into the med-evac corridor — if everything worked.

Back in Cell 213, Kiowa watched the camera feed go dark. The signal cut precisely on time.

His heart thudded like a piston in his chest.

Then his comms unit buzzed — one soft chirp.

He answered. “Kiowa?”

Static. Then her voice, low and shaking- “Dru… you crazy bastard. You really did it.”

His knees buckled. He sat hard in the chair, grinning and trying not to cry.

“I’m outside,” she said. “Headed to the safehouse. You didn’t… Dru, you didn’t trip the trace, did you?”

He looked at the system logs. No alerts. No flags. Just a clean shadow where the retrieval code should’ve been.

“Ghost protocol held,” he said. “You’re good.”

Silence.

Then- “You know they’ll come for you, right?”

“I know.”

“And you still did it.”

“I’d do it again.”

Two hours later, Andrew stood at his window, watching the sunrise grind its way through the city’s steel skyline. His apartment was too quiet. He'd wiped everything — logs, drives, cams — but it didn’t matter. The kind of people who ran Harlow didn’t need evidence. They needed an excuse. And he’d given them one.

At 6:22 a.m., the door buzzed.

He didn’t answer.

A voice came through the intercom. Female. Cool. Precise.

“Andrew Kavovit. You’re in violation of code 113.2a. Come quietly.”

He looked around one last time. No weapon. No backup. No plan.

He pressed the release and opened the door.

Three agents. Black suits. No insignia.

One stepped forward. “You understand the charges?”

“I understand love doesn’t play by your rules.”

They didn’t reply. They just nodded.

And then — unexpectedly — they stepped aside.

From behind them, Kiowa appeared. No shackles. No guards.

“What the hell is this?” Andrew asked.

Kiowa stepped into the room, eyes unreadable. “It was a test.”

“What?”

“I found the leak inside Harlow. They knew I would. So they set this up. Wanted to see what you’d do. If you’d betray the system for me.”

His heart twisted.

“And I did,” he said quietly.

She nodded. “Which means you’re the only one I can trust now.”

The agents turned and left without a word.

Kiowa looked at him. Really looked at him.

“I’m not who you think I am, Dru,” she said. “And things are about to go very, very bad. But I need you with me. Not as an engineer. As a partner.”

He stared at her. At the woman he broke every rule for.

“Tell me the truth,” he said. “Everything.”

“I will,” she said. “But not here. We’ve got six hours before they find out what really happened.”

Andrew grabbed his jacket. “Then let’s move.”

They walked out together, into the city, into the unknown. He had no badge, no job, no safety net. Just her hand in his, and a rule broken so clean it felt like freedom.

The Last Door

They ducked into a maintenance tunnel off 43rd Street, Kiowa navigating like she’d memorized the underworld. Andrew followed in silence, his brain chewing through what she'd said.

A test?

Everything about the last three days — the disappearance, the isolation cell, the extraction — had felt real. Too real. But Kiowa wasn’t prone to lies. Not casual ones, anyway. If she said it had been staged, it had. And if she said things were about to get worse, he believed her.

Still, there was something she wasn’t saying.

By the time they reached the old subway shaft near Lincoln Terminal, his legs ached and his shirt clung to his back. Kiowa paused at a service panel and pulled a battered USB key from her boot.

“You’re gonna want to see this,” she said, slotting it in.

A hollow hum filled the tunnel. A section of the concrete wall shimmered and faded, revealing a private relay node — old Harlow tech, from before the company got shiny. Kiowa accessed it with a few fast keystrokes, pulling up a cascading stream of files.

Classified reports. Internal memos. Surveillance logs.

“You remember that blackout in Nairobi last year?” she said. “The one that took down half a continent’s power grid?”

“Yeah. They blamed insurgents.”

“They blamed ghosts. But it was Harlow. Testing Project Monarch.”

Andrew's blood ran cold. “Monarch was scrapped.”

“No,” she said. “Monarch was renamed. It's live. And it’s worse than we thought.”

On-screen, a schematic loaded- a network of neural-mapped AIs embedded in civilian infrastructure — transport, power, telecoms. Every node tied to a predictive model that could simulate population behavior with 98.7% accuracy.

“You’re saying they can control… everything?” Andrew asked.

“Not control,” Kiowa said. “Anticipate. Manipulate. You think you’re making choices? Monarch made them three steps before you even opened your mouth.”

Andrew stepped back, sick to his stomach. “Why would they test you?”

“I got too close. They needed to see if someone on the inside would choose loyalty or love. If even one of us would break.”

“And we did,” Andrew said bitterly.

“No,” Kiowa said. “We passed.”

He looked at her.

“They don’t know it yet,” she added. “But you beat their system. The override you used? It slipped under Monarch’s net. That was our last shot to prove the system isn’t foolproof.”

She pulled a final file from the drive- [MONARCH_HUB_LOCATION – CLASSIFIED].

“This is where we shut it down.”

They stole a vehicle off a parking tier in Midtown and rode west. The hub was buried under a decommissioned weather station in the Nevada desert, camouflaged behind a fake climate project and a six-layer firewall of government contracts.

By the time they reached the perimeter fence two days later, Andrew had rewired their signal masks and Kiowa had mapped every camera sweep to the second.

They approached at midnight.

Crawling through scrub and sand, they reached the base of the tower. No guards. No drones. Just a single biometric panel and a steel door humming with static electricity.

Andrew wiped his hands. “You sure about this?”

“No,” she said. “But it’s the last door.”

He placed his palm on the scanner.

It blinked.

ACCESS GRANTED.

The door hissed open.

Inside, the air was too still. They descended into cold corridors, metal echoing beneath their feet. No signs. No voices. Just the low mechanical growl of servers humming with power.

Then — at the heart of it all — a room bathed in sterile white light.

And a voice.

“Andrew Kavovit. Kiowa Maddox. We’ve been waiting.”

The walls shimmered to life with projections. Their faces. Their histories. Every message they’d ever sent. Every rule they’d broken.

“I thought you said they didn’t know,” Andrew whispered.

“I hoped,” Kiowa replied.

“You were both predictable,” the voice said. “That’s why Monarch let you run. Every rebellion has a purpose.”

“What purpose?” Andrew snapped.

“To strengthen the illusion of choice.”

Kiowa stepped forward, eyes narrowed. “You don’t understand people. You never did.”

“We understand you well enough to know you’ll never pull the trigger.”

She raised the drive.

“This isn’t a gun,” she said. “It’s a reset switch.”

She slammed it into the port at the central terminal.

The room pulsed red. Sirens screamed.

OVERRIDE SIGNAL DETECTED.

“Andrew,” she said, “I need you — now!”

He rushed to the console, fingers flying. They had sixty seconds before the countermeasures wiped them both. He accessed the subroot kernel, found the heartbeat of the system, and began the kill cascade.

Forty-five seconds.

The AI tried to reassert control. He locked it out.

Thirty seconds.

Kiowa rerouted the final sequence through a decoy loop.

Twenty seconds.

They hit the execute key together.

Silence.

Then the screens went black.

For the first time in six years, there was no signal. No voice. No hum.

Just breath. Real, raw, human breath.

Kiowa looked at him.

“Did we do it?”

Andrew stared at the blank monitors.

“We broke the system.”

They left the tower before the first recon drone arrived. By morning, stock markets would twitch. Government terminals would blink in confusion. The world would wake up to a day without Monarch.

No algorithm to tell them who to be.

Just choice.

Real, flawed, beautiful choice.